In this paper, we propose an analytical model to evaluate
the power consumption in the switching fabric of a bufferless
shared-per-wavelength (SPW) optical packet switch architecture
in which one bank of wavelength converters (WC) is dedicated
to each wavelength. We assume that both optical gates and WCs
are realized in semiconductor optical amplifier technology. In our
evaluation, we account for the power consumption of the current
drivers needed to both controlling the used active devices and supplying
the thermoelectric coolers. SPW allows for a complexity
reduction of the spatial switching matrix that leads to reduced
power consumption with respect to other switching architectures.
Results show the effectiveness in terms of consumed power of the
considered architecture with respect to the shared-per-node reference
architecture, where a fully sharing strategy ofWCs is adopted.
Themain results showthat SPWallows us to reduce the power consumption
in the order of 26% for offered traffic equal to 0.6. The
obtained results also show how the fabric switching of the SPW
optical packet switch consumes much less power per gigabits per
second carried than the one of a typical commercial core router.

In this paper, we propose an analytical model to evaluate
the power consumption in the switching fabric of a bufferless
shared-per-wavelength (SPW) optical packet switch architecture
in which one bank of wavelength converters (WC) is dedicated
to each wavelength. We assume that both optical gates and WCs
are realized in semiconductor optical amplifier technology. In our
evaluation, we account for the power consumption of the current
drivers needed to both controlling the used active devices and supplying
the thermoelectric coolers. SPW allows for a complexity
reduction of the spatial switching matrix that leads to reduced
power consumption with respect to other switching architectures.
Results show the effectiveness in terms of consumed power of the
considered architecture with respect to the shared-per-node reference
architecture, where a fully sharing strategy ofWCs is adopted.
Themain results showthat SPWallows us to reduce the power consumption
in the order of 26% for offered traffic equal to 0.6. The
obtained results also show how the fabric switching of the SPW
optical packet switch consumes much less power per gigabits per
second carried than the one of a typical commercial core router.